The Raven System

ID
TR-92-15
Authors
Donald Acton, Terry Coatta and Gerald Neufeld
Publishing date
August 1992
Length
43 pages
Abstract
This report describes the distributed object-oriented system, Raven. Raven is both a distributed operating system as well as a programming language. The language will be familiar to C programmers in that it has many constructs similar to the C programming language. Raven uses a simple, uniform object model in which all entities, at least conceptually, are objects. The object model supports classes for implementation inheritance and type checking. Both static and dynamic typing as well as static and dynamic method binding is supported. Object behavior is defined by the class of the object. The language is compiled (rather than interpreted) and supports several features that improve performance. Support also exists for parallel and distributed computing as well as persistent data. Raven is designed specifically for high-performance parallel and distributed applications. Note: The Raven System has undergone many changes since this report was published. The report acurately reflects the basic operating principles of Raven, but the syntactic details of Raven are no longer the same.